"Every writer has to find their own way into writing"

Margaret Mahy reminds us that the craft isn’t a single staircase but a maze of doorways, each writer discovering which one opens when pressure is applied. Technique, habit, and temperament form a private circuitry. Some enter through character voices that won’t quiet down; others begin with a question, a mood, a place, or the thrum of a sentence in the ear. For one, the outline is a bridge; for another, an outline is a cage and the only workable path is wandering. Longhand can slow the mind into depth; dictation can outrun self-censorship. Morning pages, midnight sessions, public cafés, silent rooms, each can be the necessary key.

Advice and craft books offer maps, but maps are not the ground. Imitation is a useful apprenticeship, but it is scaffolding, not the finished house. Method becomes liberating only when tested against a writer’s body clock, attention span, fears, pleasures, and the texture of their life, work schedules, caregiving, illness, neurodivergence, community, and culture. “Way into” also names the spark that makes the blank page porous: an image that haunts, a knot of research, an ethical itch, a metaphor that reframes the world. When that spark is found, resistance lowers and momentum gathers.

The path is not singular or permanent. Each project asks for a new passport: a different rhythm, tool, stance. What worked last time can betray you now. Flexibility becomes a form of courage, permission to be a beginner again, to court detours, to discard rituals that have hardened into superstition. Constraints can be invitations; deadlines can be engines; play can be method.

Finding one’s way is ultimately an act of listening, both to the material and to oneself. When approach and temperament align, the voice clarifies and the work acquires its necessary strangeness. The task is not to locate the right way but to cultivate a way that is yours, and to keep remaking it as the writing remakes you.